And certainly for the fire department - it's the worst mass casualty event they have ever had to respond to.
While he was not on the scene, Kenneth Mortis from the Belize National Fire Service told us today that just from the bits and pieces of preliminary info his team gathered from the scene, the best estimate he could have made was that, none of the victims suffered a gruesome death, but instead due to the number of passengers in the car, some of them may have died before the fire consumed the vehicle.
Kenneth Mortis, Belize National Fire Service
"When you look at 9 people in a small car such as a Corolla of that size I mean even now I am trying to fathom how can I fit 9 people in a car? Those types of cars max I can squeeze in would be 6 or 7 max but I'm looking at 9 so it would be hard to comment if they would have survived the accident had it not turned this way out?They would have definitely been squished I mean Creole has a phrase that says sardine in a tin so either way you look at it we would have had fatalities I'm not so sure if the entire 9 would have been that fire just played a devasting part in contributing to the accident. The autopsy I believe will definitely determine whether they died as a result of the impact and whether they died as a result of smoke and heat inhalation because of the magnitude that they were crushed together some of them just burnt to death you know. Being in this field of work I would want to but I'm not going to conclusively say that but I believe that most of them just died from smoke and heat inhalation and then the fire consumed the balance of the bodies."
